The Northwest Files

History's Ripples

We are in such a hell of a mess. I’ve been wondering lately if we would be where we are if President Lincoln had lived.

For sure, the fight for equality for people of color would have been different.

For sure, the bitterness of the former Confederate states, and the treasonous sonsabitches that occupy them, would have been at least somewhat assuaged.

Do you doubt that? Look it up. Lincoln intended to pursue policies of forgiveness and brotherhood.

His assassination changed all that. The result is that black people, and brown people, and red people, and yellow people, and people of other faiths, and of non-traditional genders, still fight for the rights that the rest of us take for granted.

The former Confederate states? They’re the hotbed of the tea party, a regressive gang of conservative Republicans who oppose progress, who oppose, even, democracy and its basic tenets – a vote for every citizen, for example.

And look where we are now. Just look. All because of John Wilkes Booth. A pistol. A bullet.

We can’t know how things might have turned out, had Lincoln lived. We can’t know how the present might have looked, had history’s ripples carried forward Lincoln’s good and humanitarian intentions. But it would have been different. You can bet on that.

But the present turned out the way it turned out.

We are in such a hell of a mess.

-JFT

On the Trail of the Great American Adventure

I’ve for a good while been interested in Lewis & Clark and the Corps of Discovery. From May,1804 through September, 1806, at the urging and support of President Thomas Jefferson, this group of 35-or-so men and one woman, a Shoshone called Sa-kah-ga-wea (this phonetic spelling approximates the seven variations of her name Lewis and Clark used in their journals), traveled by foot, horseback and boat from a camp just outside St. Louis, Missouri to the mouth of the mighty Columbia River, and then back to St. Louis. Below, Fort Clatsop. As always, click on an image to see it fullsize.

Their goal was to explore the Louisiana Purchase and find a riverine route to the Pacific Ocean. Additionally, Lewis & Clark were tasked with mapping the area through which they traveled, analyzing the country’s usefulness for American expansion, and sending home to Jefferson examples of the plants and animals they encountered.

The corps did all that and more. They found the Columbia River, but in no way did it connect or communicate with the Missouri River. This dashed their hopes because it meant difficult overland travel. Think Rocky Mountains. But they traveled on, and in November, 1805, arrived at the Pacific Ocean.

The corps spent five months in winter camp in a place they called Fort Clatsop, named for a band of local Indians. The original Fort Clatsop is of course long gone, but a replica of it exists. Its plans were taken from Clark’s journals. Historians and archaeologists assert that the replica’s location likely “is within yards” of the original. To the left, the Astoria Bridge, 5 miles in length. That's Washington there at the other end.

Well, this was good enough for me. We headed for Astoria in the hope of perhaps hearing, even after 213 years, a faint echo of the Corps of Discovery.

Initially, we were drawn to Fort Clatsop. But we found much more. In the final phase of their trip, the corps traveled down the northern side of the Columbia, in what is now Washington. They spent a miserable six days at a place they called the Dismal Niche. It was dismal for them because it offered no protection from a ferocious November storm that kept them wet and cold in heavy rain and high winds for the entire time they sheltered there, the river being far too rough for them to travel upon.  An empty grain ship ghosts past our hotel room's balcony.

The Niche was just a few miles from their objective – the true mouth of the Columbia and its opening to the Pacific Ocean. When they arrived there after rounding a point on Cape Disappointment on November 15, 1805, they set up a temporary camp they called Station Camp.

They were there for about 10 days. They then moved to the site of Fort Clatsop, across the river, which is more than 5 miles wide there at Station Camp, because local Indians told them that area had abundant game and a source of salt, which they badly needed.

So, OK, lots to see. We installed ourselves in a hotel in Astoria – a nice little town containing some pretty good restaurants and lots of seafood – and set out.

But first we gloried in the view from the balcony of our room. We were right on the water, immediately west of the Astoria Bridge, the 5-mile-long span that connects Oregon and Washington. From our vantage point we had marvelous views of the river, of sunrises and sunsets, the Washington shoreline, the bridge itself, and of cargo ships heading upstream to take on loads of grain, then downstream and out to sea to deliver that grain.

We also found the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center. This is in a state park on Cape Disappointment, across the Astoria Bridge. It’s a former military facility with its own interesting history and is perched atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific. At left, a lighthouse on Cape Dissappointment.

Fortunately, as a state facility, it was not affected by the gub’mnt shutdown of late 2018, so we were able to visit.

We rambled around Cape Disappointment a bit, taking in some of the same views, and hearing the same crashing of waves against North American stone, upon which Clark, who explored this area while at Station Camp, commented.

This overview accomplished, we stopped at Dismal Niche, which is not easily accessible, but which is marked by a small park nearby; Station Camp, another small park that offers a nice interpretive trail outlining the lives of the Indians who were living there when Lewis & Clark arrived, and finally, Fort Clatsop.

Fort Clatsop offers its own interpretive center. We like these centers because of the stories they tell. But there was no story for us this visit. This is a national park, so it was closed during our visit by the government shutdown.

But something really fun happened. We were walking through the rain around the parking lot, trying to catch a view of something, anything, through the park’s heavy woods, when a car drove up. A nice young woman rolled down her window and told us that if we just made our way past a bike rack and edged around the interpretive center, we would find a trail that lead to the replica fort.

So that’s what we did.

The replica is tiny and built of cedar using only hand tools, just as the corps would have built it. It was locked, so while we could get into the fort’s courtyard, we couldn’t enter its rooms. Ah, well.

With the local possibilities exhausted, we headed down the Oregon Coast to Cannon Beach, a place named for a cannon found there after the wreck of a warship. Clark took a small detachment of men down there to explore and to obtain a supply of meat from a whale that Indians there had killed.

So, as you see, we got far more from our visit than just Fort Clatsop. And we heard the waves crashing against Cape Disappointment’s rocks, which I figure is a faint echo of the same sounds Clark heard.

At the end of the day, ours was not a Great American Adventure. But it was a small personal adventure, one with which we were very happy.

If you get a chance and you enjoy American history, you might want to think about seeing these sites. They are beautiful and interesting, and redolent of the spirit that opened the American West, for all the good and bad that that wrought.

-JFT

Dinosaurs and Dust (or, No Country for Epicureans)

Laura and I have been promising ourselves an adventure for months. This past week, we took that adventure. We had two goals: We set out to see the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which is maybe two hours east of our home here in Redmond. And we aimed to see the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, along with a segment of the old trail itself. That’s about five hours east of here.

We had several other goals, as well – these included being well-fed and well-lodged. We were not wholly successful in achieving those goals. But I’ll get to that. First, this: Please click on the thumbnail photos in order to view them fullsize.

The John Day National Monument is composed of five units. We visited just two. Our first stop was at the Painted Hills unit. And spectacular these hills are. They are composed of layers of volcanic ash, debris and chemicals deposited over about 40 million years.

The unit is small, just about a mile square. But it contains stark, amazing beauty – wide, near-horizontal swaths of color decorate these hills, as if some giant, god-like artist took a swipe at these hills after dipping his/her brush into many colors of paint, rich reds, oranges, yellows and white.

And there’s buried treasure there. These hills also are the home of many types of leaf fossils, though I’m sure you’d be prosecuted, shot, then skinned, for trying to find them. But in the overall story of the John Day Fossil Beds, these are small potatoes.

If it’s fossils you want, you have to go to the fossil center itself, a few miles down the road from the Painted Hills unit. Its real name is the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center and it’s located in what is called the Sheep Rock unit. It is spectacular.

According to what we learned there, a 10,000-square-mile chunk of Eastern Oregon is home to the most spectacular trove of prehistoric animals and plant fossils on the globe. The TCPC contains a vast collection of the fossilized remains of those organisms, documenting about 50 million years. It does it through large displays that explain at least seven paleontological eras evident at the site.

The differences between these eras are extreme, ranging from dry deserts to wet, sticky marshlands, to moderate savannas. Our takeaway from this is that Earth never has stopped changing and is changing still.

The fossils run the gamut from predators to prey, to mammals to reptiles to birds, to insects, to leaves, and to fruit, nuts and seeds. The variety is hard to take in.

Next stop was John Day itself, a former booming gold-rush town that now boasts 1,200 residents.

It was here that we got the first clue vis-à-vis dining. There were not many restaurants here. Hey, why would there be? This place is charming, sure, and it rests in a beautiful environment, but it’s tiny.

The solution? When in doubt in Oregon, repair to the nearest brew pub. It will offer pub grub, which usually is pretty good, and craft-brewed beer, which always is excellent. In this case, it was the 1188 Brew Pub. Not a mistake.

Our next stop was Baker City, about three hours east over mountainous roads. This is Oregon’s gold country. Gold is found in quartz, which is found in granite, which is found in mountainous upthrusts that are very different from the vulcanism that formed so much of the rest of Oregon. And these, the Elkhorn Mountains and the Blue Mountains, are real granite mountains, just like the Sierra Nevadas. So they hold gold.

Baker City, it turns out, was the center of Eastern Oregon’s gold rush, which occurred between the 1850s and the 1950s. This was by no means the equivalent of the California Gold Rush, but still it was significant enough for the merchants and bankers of Baker City to become rich.

That wealth today is reflected by a significant collection of magnificent stone buildings that line the town’s wide streets. Those streets today are very quiet, with a number of empty store fronts, signifying that the good times are past and gone. Still, it’s a very pretty little town. I hope that better times are coming.

Those better times would do well to burnish the Geiser Grand Hotel, on the city’s main street, where we spent three nights. Nice old place but to my mind, wanting a bit of a touch-up here and there, as well as some attention to detail.

Not least in the hotel restaurant. We dined there the first night. We vowed never to return. Second night, we hit a brew pub, with the expected satisfactory results. Third night, we hit a Mexican restaurant. It was bloody awful. So back to brew pubs.

We were in Baker City because of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, perhaps 10 miles east of town. What a treat that place is. It sits by itself atop a hill adjacent to the old trail, which remains baking in the sun and stretching into the east and west distance, as it has for 175 years.

The center contains a series of dioramas featuring beautifully realized life-size displays showing pioneers of all ilk during imagined snapshot moments of their trip from Independence, Missouri, the trail’s beginning, to Oregon City, now a Portland suburb, where it ended. It includes trappers, teamsters, whites, Indians, oxen, horses, men, women, children. There also are displays of artifacts.

I think what we liked the most, however, was the hour-long film about life on the trail. This was not an easy trip. It took six months and basically cost everything the travelers had. And sometimes it cost more than that. It is said that the 2,000-mile-long trail is lined by an average of 80 graves per mile.

Mortality at this level seems a very high price to pay for the privilege of carving a new home, a new life, out of the Oregon wilderness, which was still many weeks away from this place.

Though choking dust no longer marks the passage of emigrants, the trail remains very well-marked. The steel wheels of thousands of wagons pounded, battered and packed the trail’s surface to the point where to this day, nothing grows in the trail’s ruts, so the trail remains easily visible. You can see it on Google Earth. Or you can go there, as Laura and I did, and walk on it for a short distance, kicking up our own dust.

I’m mighty happy that I’m walking the trail now, rather than 150 years ago, when it would have been mighty hard to find a brew pub. Those were hard people. They had to be.

Sumpter, a dozen or so miles west of Baker City, contains two wonderful echoes of the gold rush. They are the Sumpter Railroad and the Sumpter Dredge. We found the railroad yards deserted. Seasonal tourists gone, the operation is mostly closed at this time of year. All the better to wander, allowing ourselves to be led by our curiosities.

Same with the dredge, which still floats in a pond that it dug for itself. This thing was built in 1935 and operated – basically eating wide swaths of the valley surface in which it sits – until 1953. The damage is so immense, and so permanent, that you can find the dredge’s damage easily visible on Google Earth just to the south of Sumpter. It is not a positive testament to the greed of men.

Our final stop was Joseph, a high-mountain arts/ranching community in the Wallowa Mountains, said to be Oregon’s alps, about two hours north and east of Baker City. It’s a cute little town with a couple of high-quality galleries, plus the foundry in which the bronze art contained in those galleries is cast using the lost wax method.

I’m still not sure I understand how that works, but I now have a much better idea, having taken the factory tour, which happens only at 11 am, just as the workers are about to take their lunch break. It’s worth doing.

So is a lunch break. Having learned our lesson, which is basically that the boondocks of Eastern Oregon is no country for epicureans, we again hit the local brew pub, then checked in to the Belle Pepper Bed & Breakfast, which is contained in a nicely restored old home on one of Joseph’s side streets. Nice place. But they sure do keep the place cold. And if you are not ready to have breakfast at 8:30 am, you don’t get breakfast.

Dinner that night was at the Wallowa Lodge, adjacent to Wallowa Lake, prime fishing water and also, at its north end, the burial place of Chief Joseph, chief of the Nez Perce. Who apparently were not treated well by the U.S. Government. But tell me, which tribe was? And thus do we have America’s original sin.

But now, except for a quick stop at the woolen mills in Pendleton, the trip is over. We opt for the easy way home, much of the way on Interstate 84. Man, this is gorgeous country. It makes me very happy to call Oregon our home, and to be so situated that a wonderful adventure is just a few hours away from home base. That said, however, home remains the best place of all. Plus, the food is the best!

-JFT

The Music of Lady Liberty

This killer image, Lady Liberty with her right fist raised and a fine old guitar in her left hand, hits me right where I live. But you knew that.

This is a detail from the poster for the 2017 Sisters Folk Festival, a festival that didn't happen. Of course we had tickets! It was called off, literally at the last second, because smoke from nearby forest fires made the air all around these parts unhealthy to breath. I drove over to Sisters, which is quite close to us, to purchase event T-shirts just because I could, and because I wanted to extend what support I could. The front of those shirts displays a version of this image.

I find myself surprisingly emotional every time I see this. In part, I think, that's because of the profound meaning of the Statue of Liberty, a meaning that is being insulted by the fools in the present administration. But also because the guitar shown in this painting echoes the shape and lines of Martin's famous 00 family of guitars, small jewels that are far more powerful than their size might indicate.

They were one of the mainstays of the 1960s folk movement and to this day are incredibly desirable. I'm very lucky. I have one. I bought it in the summer of 1962 and it has been with me ever since. I never will part with it. (Find the story of that guitar here:  http://jfthompson.typepad.com/californiafiles/2017/06/thumb-drive.html )

The folk movement, of course, was sounded on these guitars and existed in the music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Leadbelly, the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, Josh White, and many more. It was the music of inclusion, of progressive politics. That such a guitar should show up in the clutches of Lady Liberty in this poster - it just has tremendous meaning for me. 

What has equal and ominous meaning is that I have no idea where we all will end up when this ugly episode finally is done. Neither, I'm sure, do the idiots and fools who pretend to "lead" us. 

About all I can hope is that Lady Liberty and the ideals for which she stands remain intact. And I hope that the wonderful music, the folk, bluegrass, and Americana that is played on the sort of instrument you see her handling, continues to make its positive, progressive, and non-violent contribution.

As for this year, why, yes, of course we have tickets to the 2018 Sisters Folk Festival! We're keeping our fingers crossed that we don't get smoked out, or burned out, again. And also that this horrid political nightmare soon comes to its conclusion. Please hurry, Mr, Mueller.

-JFT

Digging for Gold, and for History

Gold is curious stuff, isn't it?

There just isn't much of it anywhere on the planet, and when a cache is found, men go to extremes to extract the contents of that cache.

Those extremes have much to do why the history of the California Gold Rush is so interesting. Hopeful men, shivering in icy streams, began by panning the sand and gravel found in those streambeds. Sometimes they found a nugget or two, sometimes they found a bit of dust, but more likely they found nothing.

Then mechanization took over and the gold seekers turned to hard-rock mining. They took billions of dollars away from the Sierra Nevadas through this means.

But gold wasn't found just in the mountains. It might be found anywhere water flowed from those mountains – and not just in existing rivers, miles from the mountains, but also in the gravels – they are called auriferous gravels – of prehistoric riverbeds, beds existing rivers long ago abandoned, or beds of rivers that long ago disappeared.

Hm, how to get the gold out of those rivers? That question was answered by the invention of the dredge.

Here's the historical plaque attesting to the presence of the dredge? But where in the world is it? (As always, please click on the photos to see them fullsize.)

They're still used today. You can, in fact, buy small, light, single-man dredges in almost any hardware store in the Gold Country.

But that's for hobbyists. Seekers after gold who were serious needed much more serious machinery. And that's how the Tuolumne Gold Dredge came into being.

It started operation near the town of La Grange, Calif., in 1938 and operated until 1951. Then its operators ran it aground where it had been working, shut down its impressive array of equipment, and walked away.

It's been sitting there, quietly rusting, ever since.

Bob Taylor, my pal and brother-in-law, happened to mention this giant piece of historic equipment - it's about two football fields long and about four stories high - during a holiday visit. He said he knew of it, but had never seen it. So I said, grabbing my shoes and camera, "Why aren't we on our way there now?"

So we drove to La Grange, a tiny remnant of a town, founded in 1848, that now has withered to almost nothing – a museum, which as closed, and a tiny store that sold mostly booze. We asked after the dredge. Nobody knew. One guy told us that he thought it was a ways down yonder road.

So yonder road it was. We quickly found the historical marker telling the dredge's story. But we could see no dredge. Which was odd, because these things are enormous. If it's there – and where would it go? – we should have been able to see it.

Hmm. I dialed up Google Earth on my phone and discovered that it was indeed there – indeed, it is so big that it's hard to miss in the satellite shot. It's just a ways off the road and hidden from view by clumps of brush that have grown up around it.

Sky-high view? Here it is, straight from Google Earth. The dredge and the lake it dug for itself are clearly visible.

So we hiked a half mile or so to see the thing up close. It's impressive, sitting there in its self-made lake, pretty much where it dug out its last bucketful.

This, below, is just about the best view of this enormous piece of equipment. This, I think, would have been the rear of the dredge. As you can see, graffiti idiots have got to it.

This thing had a long boom along which ran large, steel buckets on a chain. The operators lowered the boom through gold-bearing gravels, all the way down to bedrock, where the heavy gold came to rest. The buckets gnawed through the gravels in front of the dredge, picked them up and carried them to the machine's internal systems, which separated the gold from the rock and sand, and then spat that rock and sand out its back. The thing, you see, didn't need an existing lake or river. It made its own moving lake as it worked.

And that's where this one quietly sits today, in an autonomous pond that it created, fed by groundwater percolating from the nearby Tuolumne River – the one that started this business of dredging in this location in the first place – as it flows straight out of the Mother Lode.

In its day, this beast must have been an awesome sight, chewing out huge swaths of rock and gravel, spitting the tailings out its rear conveyor belt, and separating the gold that made jewelry and other precious things for our parents – all to an ear-shattering din as its machinery did its work.

Not much left of a once proud old beast, run aground where it last worked. Its boom and tangled piles of cable as thick as your wrist rest nearby.

There are several of these old dredges around, some of them recipients of preservation efforts. This one has not received that kind of care. It's just an old mechanical warrior, its last battle over, waiting for the elements to claim it. It's worth seeing while we can.

-JFT

Belief vs Knowledge

I'm interested in, and more than a little puzzled by, the dichotomy between belief and knowledge.

I've been thinking about this within the context of a book I've been (re)reading. Its title is "Hard Road West, History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail," authored by Keith Heyer Meldahl.

This is good stuff and highly recommended (available from Amazon), especially for we Californians, and especially for those of us who are interested in the Gold Rush and in the incredible diversity of geologic forms that are found all over the state.

But it's just a tiny section, a couple of paragraphs, really, that got me thinking and scratching my head. They're found in the early part of this work, where the author is discussing the early days of the science of geology, the early writings of the fathers of that science, and the familiarity with those writings possessed by at least some Gold Rush travelers.

Meldahl writes, "By the mid-nineteenth century, most scientists had accepted both the evidence that the Earth is very old and that gradual, uniform, present-day processes, operating over immense spans of time, have created most of its geologic features."

In fact, he points out, a seminal book called "Principles of Geology," written by Scotsman Charles Lyell in the 1830s, was known to some of those making the trip from staging points on the Missouri River to California's gold fields.

Meldahl points out that in their letters and notes, these travelers remarked upon the geology they were seeing, and they did so from Lyell's perspective.

So let us classify the information upon which they based their observations as knowledge, observations confirmed by science, even though it was incomplete - the critical discovery, for instance, of plate tectonics was still more than a century in the future. But Lyell understood the basics and so did some of those who read his book, even as their fellow travelers attributed, in their own writings, what they saw to the hand of a divine being.

I'm puzzled by this: Here we are more than 180 years later, with a vastly greater and much more provable understanding of the Earth and its history and processes and with much more widely spread education, but belief, at least among many, seems to trump knowledge. Still we have people who believe, for instance, that geologic features and changes are the result of a divine being, that Grand Canyon was formed in a week and that Earth is 6,000 years old. They are able to ignore, in other words, what has been established, settled science for nearly 200 years.

It's my understand that most of organized religion's recognized thinkers discard these beliefs. But out the greater world they seem to persist, with folks choosing belief over knowledge.

I used to tell the reporters I worked with, when asking them to check a source or gather additional information for a story, "It's better to know than to not know." It seems that not everyone agrees.

Better to say, I think, "I just don't know," than to hew to a point of view that relies upon belief but that has no scientific basis - a belief that can't be proven by the scientific method, in other words. Perhaps it all comes down to emotion vs. intelligence, with no thoughtful balance between the two. I'd hate to think that it's something that elemental, but it just might be.

-JFT  

 

On the Santa Fe Trail

"Red chilies, green chilies, or Christmas-style?"

When a waiter asks that question, you know you are in Santa Fe. That's because here in New Mexico, the chili is a big deal. (And here on the left is the way they are displayed almost everywhere. As always, click on the picture, and on the ones to follow, to see it fullsize.)
And so is the difference between green chilies and red ones. (Clue: They turn red, and from merely hot to very hot, with age.)

My choice was Christmas-style - on other words, a selection of both. And on this occasion it was at the Plaza Cafe in Santa Fe for breakfast. Huevos rancheros, naturally.

Man, those chilies are hot, whichever style you choose. But that suits me just fine because we're here, at least in part, to chase down some hot New Mexican cooking.

We decided on a road trip this Christmas, since we have no family to keep us around home. So we loaded up the "Magic Carpet," as Laura calls her car, and headed out.

Stayed at the old St. Francis Hotel, just a block from the city's old plaza and the Palace of the Governors, which was built in 1610 and is the oldest continually occupied public building in the U.S. It's also where scores of Indian silver artists
offer their wares, which they spread out on blankets under the portico, so is very much worth a stroll.

It is this sort of history that draws us here. Also the food. And also the art. And also the altitude, which is right at 7,000 feet. And also the light, which because of the altitude and cleanliness of the air, is absolutely crystal-clear, so bright that it reveals what things, and colors, actually are supposed to look like.

We hit a couple of the city's best restaurants - the Santa Cafe and Geronimo, respectively, for dinner Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I preferred the former, I think. The latter was good but incredibly expensive. We wanted badly to get into Tomasita's, down in the old Railyard section of town and renowned for its traditional Mexican food, but the place was just too busy to seat us without a wait of at least an hour. Not-gonna-happen.com.

Canyon Drive, a short walk from the town center, is where you find art. Hey, this ancient street, filled with galleries housed in period buildings, is an art piece all its own. We poked through galleries, for sure, but mostly I enjoyed just walking the street and checking out the buildings.

It was cold here. Mornings saw the thermometer reading 17. Temps never rose above about 25 for the four days we were here. But Laura and I packed for this and so did well in spite of the fact that all four of us - Laura's sister, Marilyn Taylor, and her husband, Bob, were along on this expedition - were struggling with the flu.

For most of our visit we stayed close to town, either prowling the sidewalks for window-shopping opportunities or cruising the neighborhoods checking out the gorgeous homes. Expensive stuff. In fact, everything here is expensive.

Friday morning, after the Taylors headed for show reservations in Las Vegas, we headed for Taos and into the teeth of a storm. We stopped along the way to visit the 200-year-old church in Chamayo, and at first thought about completing our journey to Taos through Truchas, up in the mountains. But the storm got severe, the snow got deep, and the road got treacherous. We opted for caution over adventure so turned around and headed back, choosing the main route to Taos, Highway 84. But even that became treacherous, with very slow going.

Taos, like Santa Fe, seems to be trying to out-do Albuquerque as the King of Sprawl. We last were here some 25 years ago and found the amount of growth since then astounding. The historic plaza - that old Indian-killer Kit Carson walked here - seemed smaller and more down-market than we remembered, and certainly more-so than that of Santa Fe.

The real treat was a visit to the Taos Pueblo. This is a huge, rambling adobe structure - series of structures, really - at least 1,000 years old. It was built and remains occupied by the Red Willow People, named for the Red Willow Creek, which runs through the middle of the place, supplying the pueblo's drinking water.

Some anthropologists now think that perhaps the first inhabitants of New Mexico's pueblos were the remains of the Anasazi, who they think may have settled here after being driven from their cliff dwellings by drought. But nobody knows for sure.

Whatever the origin of these people, stepping into this village is like a step back in time. Modern amenities like plumbing and electricity are illegal here, so when you look at the pueblo, with snow on the ground and the smell of wood smoke in the air, you see it more or less as it was when the Spanish first saw it. In other words, visit here and you step back into the early 17th century.

Indian artists have shops here, so it's possible to enter at least small sections of this ancient structure and look around as you peruse the art on offer.

While doing just that we had a chance to chat with Richard Aspenwind, one of the artists, who told us that the people here are Indians. "I'm a Redskin," he declared. His take was that "Native American" is an appellation preferred by militant younger Indians who live in cities. It's a politically correct name, he felt, and not for him. Fine by me.

Aspenwind also told us a bit about the Catholic Church's influence, or lack of it, on his tribe. He said some tribe members do attend the pueblo's church, but whether they do or don't, they all observe the ancient tribal religion, which is nature-based. Hearing him talk about the sun and moon, and about animals such as the bear, then considering what a mess so-called Western Civilization has made of things, it was hard for me to not find this take on spirituality to be inviting. Well, hey, my mom always insisted that hiding back there somewhere there's a little bit of Indian blood.

We're home now and glad to be here, the Magic Carpet having nailed down a wonderful 34.7 mpg for this trip in spite of being conducted along in a very brisk manner. (We saw some incredibly cheap gas - premium for $1.80/gallon right outside Albuquerque.)

Rio and Vivi, the two cats, are happy to have us back. We think. But we're ready to go again because four days in Santa Fe are not enough. There is just so much to see and do there. We're thinking about how and when we can spend more time there to explore, attend Southwest Cooking schools, spend more time shooting photos, visit the various pueblos that dot the area, and much more. All it takes is time. And money.

-JFT

The Bulge

It was at this time of year in 1944 that elements of the German Army began its last big initiative of WW II. It pushed west through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and made good gains.

But the push was contained and then stopped. After much fighting and dying on both sides, the weather cleared and U.S. air power took control of the skies.

That was the end of that little adventure. But it really wasn't a little adventure; to refer to it in that way demeans it. It was the stuff of history, the stuff of legend. It was the Battle of the Bulge.

Laura and I visited the area a couple of years back with the idea of peeking into whatever museums we could find and visiting, especially, the forest between Bastogne, on the south, which held the Americans, and the village of Foy, on the north, which held the Germans. That forest was where the 101st Airborne's Easy Company, now memorialized as "The Band of Brothers," fought at the very northern limit of Allied lines and held. This photo, which as always you can click on to enlarge, is a memorial to Easy Company.

The central part of Bastogne is little changed, though on its fringes the town has expanded with modern construction. Foy, on the other hand, a tiny place, showed little sign of post-war development. (And by the way, you can visit this region yourself, and these places, on Google Earth.)

I have no idea what that forest was like then, but today it's a farmed lot, a place where farmers grows trees in neat rows. So it's extremely unlikely, it seems to me, that any of the trees there today are old enough to have witnessed the battle that took place there so long ago. Still, it's interesting, and very evocative, to walk this wood, listening to the pristine silence, pondering depressions in the soil and wondering if those depressions - Laura is sitting in one of them here - were foxholes, or shell holes, or just places where a tree stump was ripped from the soil.
They are perhaps a little bit of all those things, I suspect.

Bastogne is home to several museums that display the usual artifacts of war, including weapons, shell casings, helmets, uniforms, and so on. What makes them interesting is that this stuff, this effluvia of violence, continues to be dug up by farmers tilling their fields.

As you might expect, there are monuments everywhere. And also equipment. We found several nicely restored tanks, including a Sherman, parked in Bastogne's main square, with a thundering shell hole right through it.

And out in the countryside there's an especially poignant cemetery containing the last resting places of hundreds of German soldiers, patriots on the wrong side of an ugly, losing cause.

It's a place of blood, noise, courage, misery and determination. Today the countryside is peaceful, with nothing more falling on one's ear than the lowing of cattle and the racket of farm tractors.

But once upon a time, here at this place, a few good men said no to tyranny and hate. And they backed it up with blood and steel. We all are in their debt.

-JFT